On Foreign Policy -
Why are they so hard to say goodbye to dictators?
According
all logical criteria, it would be normal fighting and power struggles in the Ivory Coast, Libya and Yemen have ended several weeks ago. May end soon: on April 11 ended the conflict in Ivory Coast. But the fact that both have been extended and is symptomatic of a material fact with regard to of the individuals involved in the West is not understood.
We wonder: Why is the dictator Ivorian Laurent Gbagbo, the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh did not accept the offer, which apparently they have done, to go into exile comfortable? It sure would be most suitable for their physical safety and their bank accounts. After weeks of fighting, negotiations and demonstrations, what more do you want to prove?
This type of reasoning assumes that what separates these despots of their opponents are as safe and susceptible subjects commitment, for example, pensions and tax rates. But these men are not accustomed to political give and take, struggling to a much older things, basic and impossible to negotiate: the territory and honor, at least as they define it. His world is not made of institutions and bureaucracies that serve to govern them, a world that is to dominate swaths of territory with the help of family and tribal and regional alliances.
In that world, people like the deposed leaders of Egypt and Tunisia, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak, lack of qualities. Western-style governed through institutions and bureaucracies, and when these institutions-the army and internal security services, refused to shoot people on the street, they had no choice but to resign meekly and go into internal exile or abroad, perhaps without having made the necessary agreements for subsequent protection.
Of course, from the moral point of view, a figure like Gbagbo is particularly despicable. To satisfy his ego, Ivory Coast has been on the brink of anarchy. So I'm not apologizing, I just try to explain in part his motives. He thinks it was submitted for election and won nearly half the votes. And these were not due to their positions on social or economic problems, but what it represented in the tribal and regional level: a Southern man, of the non-Muslim country. Giving up too soon would have been betraying their regional groups and religious solidarity.
In countries without sufficient economic development, like Ivory Coast, the elections are finished, often reified distinctions of blood and belief. From their point of view, the fact that he fought until the very end, to be stuck in the basement of his palace and even more, until his enemies had to call the French to help them evict, not a sign of weakness moral, but ethical manly. (The same could be said of Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay, who died in a shootout with U.S. troops near Mosul in 2003, except that they were spoiled children, children of a mafia Stalinist dictator, and not men that they had made themselves, much less. That is, belong to a category lower than Gbagbo, Saleh and Gaddafi).
should be remembered that, rather than politicians, we're talking about warriors. For example, Saleh. The Western media described the Yemeni president as a stubborn tyrant whose obstinacy and whose attachment to power are, as in the case of Gbagbo in Ivory Coast threatening to rip apart their country. That description is true, but it falls short. Saleh has ruled Yemen for a third of a century, while his two immediate predecessors were killed after eight months, one and three years, the other. And the Yemeni dictator before they fell in a military coup. There is no denying that Saleh has nerves of steel and subtle talent, which for decades has been able to withstand some degree of tension that psychologically immobilize most experienced Washington politician. The game he is playing now, negotiating the conditions for departure, not only affects him, but the fate of their relatives, near and far.
So in a sense, who can blame him a bit more stamina, which try to get better? For Saleh, the government is not an object impersonal and legalistic, but the family business. We must dissolve in the best possible conditions, and violence is a tool in the fight. Within a few years, maybe even remember his time as a period in which there was relative stability and cooperation with the West. The fact that deserves our condemnation does not mean, from an analytical perspective, that we should underestimate it.
The government is not an object impersonal and legalistic, but the family business and then, course, is Qaddafi, who seized power in a military coup when he was only twenty years and during the 42 following has held together Libya, a country that for most of its history, has been a geographical expression with no feeling of State. As he ruled with a mixture of tribal politics and the iron fist of the internal security services, Gaddafi did not build any spirit of state and, therefore, will leave an absolute vacuum when you leave. The fact that he has not gone in silence is a sign that he did not fight for specific issues, but by a vision of honor that we find it early, because it binds to the region, tribe and territory.
But, speaking of tribes and territories, it is important to understand that special kind of tribalism that is an essential factor in Gaddafi's government, Saleh and Gbagbo has nothing primitive tribalism, pre-modern state but, as defined by the late anthropologist Ernest Gellner Europe, is the conscious rejection of a particular government in favor of a culture and a broader moral. In other words, if some tribes are against a strong Yemeni state, it may not do so by the desire of anarchy, but because they want to reach out to Islamic culture as a whole and a non repressive. The same is true with traditional Gaddafi appeals to Arab political unity and Gbagbo's attempts to eliminate the borders of French colonialism, which made him go only part of the country's population.
is clear that life under the rule of these men was hell, but his madness was a sense, though I have greatly simplified. Nobody is able to capture the appeal of life outside the State as talented as the anthropologist James C. Yale University Scott in his book The Art of Not Being Govern: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Current tribes, suggests Scott, do not live outside history, but are "all history they need "to" circumvent the State "deliberately. In other words, the tribes have all its traditions and, therefore, do not want the government to interfere in their affairs.
Gaddafi, Saleh and Gbagbo have lived with this complex and ambiguous reality all his life, and therefore states have not built, but another reason, besides moral reasons, they have not found any sympathy in the West. But that's not an argument for not try to understand.
-
0 comments:
Post a Comment